in places you'd expect; new york, london, frankfurt, tokyo, with a couple of really interesting outliers. and in the outliers was a lot of my story, places like ashford, virginia, where if you ask the network engineers that i spent a lot of time with, they would say, oh, new york, london, los angeles, ashburn, not as if it were this tiny suburb. so it's a surprisingly short list of places that are by far the hot spots, the kind of supernodes on the internet. >> host: what did these supernodes look like, mr. blum, when you visit them? >> guest: well, from the outside, they look a bit like you might say the loading dock of a shopping mall. they are quite generic from the outside, deliberately so. they try to hide in plain sight, at least when you're driving by them. inside some of them are in, um, are in old kind of art deco buildings that used to belong to western union or old telecom palaces. others are kind of, have what their operators like to call a cyberific look, kind of the aesthetic adjective of choice, meaning they kind of look like a science fiction movie, and that's deliberate.
